To each their own, but I find this decision really misguided.
It’s her money, not mine, so whatever, but l do not expect her to turn a profit in, rather the opposite.
In my view, the cross section of “IfR” users and people willing to subscribe monthly is rather small (especially if the money mostly goes to reddit - assuming I could afford it, I, for instance, would rather fund an open system like Lemmy).
And if Apollo’s dev Christian Selig decided that it wasn’t worth it with an already established paying user base, who already has a strong culture of subscriptions and exaggerated pricings, and one of the highest volume of users, at what probably was the peak usage of the platform; I don’t see how a small app like IfR can survive.
That, or Christian made a pretty expensive mistake…
Also, if it was a fair pricing!? How about a simply degressive pricing starting at the insane prices they set (or, why not, let’s get crazy, HIGHER!), and decreasing all the way to “at-cost” pricing; that would take into account the traffic of the last year into the current pricing calculations!?
I dunno why no one at reddit thought of that. Tax the opportunist new “AI Bros” users, while at the same time making it properly affordable and fair for long time users…
The only two reasons I can see for them not to propose this is either:
Or
Pick the one you like…
That, or they are dumber than me, and couldn’t even figure this logic out. In which case I’m truly sorry for them…
They could permit individual users to get API keys and then charge for that. This way would be fair and profitable while protecting them from API misuse. But forcing it on to app developers charging insane prices was their way to kill the apps.
The openai CEO is one of the first investors of reddit, was Reddit CEO for a while, reintroduced spez as the CEO.
There’s no way spez is going to let his good friend to pay this insane api prices for ai training
And in fact, i quote spez interview from the verge:
It’s interesting the part “potential business”, that means they didn’t change anything yet for them